{"id":31797,"date":"2020-02-05T08:59:38","date_gmt":"2020-02-05T08:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/?p=31797"},"modified":"2020-02-07T10:41:16","modified_gmt":"2020-02-07T10:41:16","slug":"nutanix-expert-on-how-the-nigerian-tech-market-is-evolving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/2020\/02\/05\/nutanix-expert-on-how-the-nigerian-tech-market-is-evolving\/","title":{"rendered":"Nutanix expert on how the Nigerian tech market is evolving"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As the most populated country in Africa, Nigeria must ensure that it is at the cutting edge of technology. Rowen Grierson, Regional Director West, East and Central Africa at Nutanix, tells Intelligent CIO <\/em>how the country is evolving and the work the company is doing there.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can\nyou explain the work that you do in Nigeria?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m\nthe Regional Director for West, East and Central Africa responsible for\nbuilding Nutanix\u2019s strategy and go to market across these regions. This\nincludes identifying new growth opportunities, understanding the market\ndynamic, matching partners to end users and creating a broader understanding of\nNutanix and our unique brand of hyperconvergence and virtualisation among\ncustomers in these areas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where\ndo you see the technology landscape in Nigeria and how has it changed?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nNigerian technology landscape is evolving rapidly, it is not just an enterprise\nmarket demanding an enterprise solution for a business need, we are also\nstarting to see small businesses looking to leverage what can be deemed\ntradition or legacy computing technologies for their business functions. At the\nsame time, large business is looking to scale up and innovate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\nsaid, there is however a stall or lag among customers in their ability to make\nuse of or leverage emerging technology for true innovation. But that is by no\nfault of the customer. It is a problem that the IT industry itself is creating\nas it they aren\u2019t connecting technology priorities to business outcomes as\neffectively as they should. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As\na technology vendor, there is an opportunity for us. The gaps that many OEMs\nand software companies are creating by failing to connect these priorities and\nopens up the market for companies who are able to create the link between\ntechnology and business. As with much of Africa, companies too often see them\nas the last part of the revenue link \u2013 so instead of prioritising the region\n(like we do at Nutanix), many customers are fumbling along trying to find the\nanswers themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nmarket is hungry though and they want innovation. They want the cloud, they\nwant to be secure and they want to mobilise their data assets. Personally, I am\nworking with my customers and partners on the ground to change the perception\nof IT from a negative perception to a positive one \u2013 where we evangelise our\nmessaging and value proposition into the market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\ntrends are you witnessing?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nrise of the startup culture in Nigeria is absolutely incredible and the energy\namong these smaller businesses is palpable. I also see a growing number of\ndevelopers among tech professionals, particularly as companies are looking\ntowards a more application-centric future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This\nis all supported by growing cloud adoption amongbusiness, particularly with\nregards to a growing demand for Software-as-a-Service solutions and developer\ntools in the cloud. All of this is then feeding into the megatrends, such as\nDevOps, Data Analytics and a need for Machine Learning (ML) which is all on the\nrise. It would be remiss of anyone to think Nigeria is just another African\ncountry \u2013 they are as hungry for new tech as any of the big multi-nationals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can\nyou go into detail about the current the infrastructure and connectivity in\nNigeria?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

National\ninfrastructure is still lacking in the country, that is not something we can\noverlook, and the cost of 24\/7 power supply and connectivity\/data remains high.\nBearing in mind that the country\u2019s power supply itself is not consistent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most\nlast mile connectivity options are wireless with only the large enterprises\nbeing able to afford MPLS and fibre connections. This is a problem, as\nconnectivity is seen as a deterrent or inhibitor to onboarding new technology.\nIt has also stalled the adoption of technologies such as VDI and remote\napplication delivery technologies. But again, where there are challenges there\nis opportunity, and personally I see an opportunity for SD-WAN providers in\nthis space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are\nthere any specific projects that you have been involved in recently in Nigeria\nthat you can talk about?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes,\nour message is resonating extremely well in the market due to our fresh\napproach of not just \u2018shifting tin\u2019 but focusing on providing customers with a\nplatform that makes the underlying infrastructure invisible and focusses on\nrunning applications where they are best suited from a costs, performance and\nefficiency perspective. Remember some customers in Africa haven\u2019t even virtualised\nyet, this makes leapfrog technologies like hyperconvergence and web-scale approaches\nvery attractive to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\ndon\u2019t fixate on the where, we have customers in Nigeria where we are assisting\nwith their own environment (data centre) as well as helping to consolidate\ntheir workloads across different public cloud environments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve\nrecently landed one of only a few G2K customers in the entire West, East and\nCentral Africa region. This is an exceptionally exciting win for Nutanix and a\nproject that will showcase the true value that we can provide, especially from\nboth a technical and business perspective. Our mandate from the client is to\nbetter enable business using technology and the client will be running all of\ntheir core applications on our platform \u2013 something we are already delivering\non.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nigeria\nis the most populated country in Africa. Do you think it can cater for the\ndemand in terms of IT? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes,\nNigeria is the most populated country in Africa, it is also one of the fastest\ngrowing populations in the world. With this comes a growing number of banks,\nservice providers and fintechs pushing new services into the market to try and\ngrab market share from a young, tech hungry population. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\nare also many exciting projects and developments happening that are designed to\nboost the economy. This includes the building of a new oil refinery just\noutside of Lagos that will allow Nigeria to refine their own oil (planned to be\nopened at the end of 2020 to eventually refine 650,000 barrels per day). So,\neverywhere you look there is growth, promise and opportunity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This\ncoupled, with its appetite for technology as a solution to its many\nsocio-economic challenges, highlights that Nigeria is ready for a technology\nchallenge. Its government is also looking to better retain and develop IT\nskills where it can, as well as invest in technologies, like Nutanix that don\u2019t\nrequire exhaustive IT skills to deploy, manage and maintain. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the most populated country in Africa, Nigeria must ensure that it is at the cutting edge of technology. Rowen Grierson, Regional Director West, East and Central Africa at Nutanix, tells Intelligent CIO how the country is evolving and the work the company is doing there.   Can you explain the work that you do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":31798,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4950,6,19,260,13,262,9060],"tags":[1056,291,12510,10243,890,392,7257,2754,685,2028,12508,1155,10583,50],"class_list":["post-31797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-insights","category-regional-news","category-regional-news-newsletter","category-top-stories","category-used","category-west-africa","tag-data-analytics","tag-devops","tag-g2k","tag-hyperconvergence","tag-lagos","tag-machine-learning","tag-ml","tag-mpls","tag-nigeria","tag-nutanix","tag-rowen-grierson","tag-software-as-a-service","tag-vdi","tag-virtualisation"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31797"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31822,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31797\/revisions\/31822"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}